Personal Relationships Are Impregnated with Childhood Experiences and for This Reason are Childhood-centered and Infantilized

Constantin Brancusi (1876 – 1957)

Sentimental need and sexual desire are fused in creating our fixation on personal relations. Sentimental need is the legacy of mother-child dyad. We lost the natural physical intimacy with the mother we enjoyed having when we were babies and small children, and we are unconsciously dreaming to regain what is lost – to return to this in our intimate (bodily and emotionally) relationships with another human being. Sexual desire is biologically rooted, but versatile. It is tireless, boisterous, creative and incorrigible. It is like a wasp in a jar. Sentimental need is the need to love and be loved, to rely on the other’s presence and emotional response. Sexual desire is the desire to be at the distance of touch to another body, to overcome bodily separateness.

Eros is a combination of both – sentimental need and sexual desire when they express themselves in unison without being mixed. But sexualized sentimental need or sentimentalized sexual desire is a fatal fusion in its ability to prevent people, especially the young ones, from any interest toward the larger life, the “boredom” of education and from psychological and intellectual development in general. It fixates us on the (human) body, on inter-bodily realities, on sensations, on the dizzy restlessness of blood, on how to become the king of the corner of the room. Of course, young people with their poppy search for crumbs of intimacy, must go to the public realm but mainly to try to make a good living (get a technical education and then invest it into the prosperity of their private relationships). There is less and less time for humanistic education (which is prone) to mix private and public feelings and the impulse to control what we need with the desire to belong to what we need.

In the technical world view what we need is not what we are and so we just manipulate reality because we don’t want to be manipulated by it. But in humanistic world view we have to collaborate with what we need – we don’t just need something but we love what we need, and we need to be loved by what we need. Today, under the pressure of circumstances created by the convulsive politico-economic “development” young people more and more have to sacrifice humanistic education that is poorly rewarded in comparison with technical and financial areas. The results are very sad for both realms, private and public – the public realm is reduced to predatory and conformist money-making, while the private life has become more infantilized and psychologically regressive where people are stuck in infantile modality of togetherness. The both areas are closed to civilized development, to sublimation and sophistication, be it psychological/ethical development (private relations) or social/ethical (relations in the public realm). The understanding of how the public realm “works” is not reached, and so is the understanding of how to make personal relationships more developed, successful, sublimated.

“The Kiss” – Beloveds are bigger than the world

Constantin Brancusi in his cycle of sculptures “The Kiss” addresses exactly this point about the tragic isolation of private relationships area from problems of social life. Look at this total absorption of the beloveds into one another, this total isolation from everything outside them. They have buried their eyes into each other, they have lost their ears. They have become one block of stone. Well, – some people will say. Isn’t this the nature of love to concentrate on one another and let whole world disappear? But if it could be so then humankind couldn’t successfully reproduce because it wouldn’t be able to provide the adequate environment for its own survival. Poetry and reality need to have an existential rationality as mediation. Private relationships are as romantic as they are realistic like public togetherness ought to be not only realistic but also oriented by our ideals and dreams. That’s why we not only love but also reproduce and live with one another. Brancusi pointed not only at the danger of the lovers’ forgetfulness about the world but also at the danger of world forgetting about love.

The Beloveds without the world

The Beloveds became belittled by their isolation from the world

Brancusi points out that for too many people sentimental/sexual relationships in today’s cataclysmic politico-economic system make them ignore the larger horizon of human world. People work (in the public realm) to provide for their private relations. The democratic idea of participation in decision-making about what kind of life people can have is in contradiction with our fixation on private relations and therefore our conformism in the public domain. Being engulfed in private relationships contradicts the very need of democracy for people’s educated participation. What can democracy expect from these two petrified creatures that are fused, welded into one organism, whose sensitivity and perceptibility is completely inside them, whose unity and love became the reason for their escapism from the social world?

Personal relationships will always be a substantial part of human destiny. But exclusive dedication to private life leads to exploitative position toward public realm (“I am going to the world to make money and to consume”), to a conservative posture vis-à-vis political reality. And then private relations become in turn suffocated without the world.

The Beloveds ignore the social space

Social space ignores the beloveds

Beloveds transformed into Lilliputians with one giant blind eye

21 Responses

I’ve enjoyed this entry, Victor. It’s interesting to see you read so much into these wonderful sculptures, but you’re obviously burdening Brancusi with your own ideas about “private” vs. “public” spheres of life. The lovers are joined in a kiss. The kiss may last a moment, or a series of moments, and during those moments they may forget the world (“ignore the social space”, as you put it). But where’s the basis for your interesting claim that, in order to support their love, they will have to renounce the subtleties of “humanistic” education and pursue technical education and thus “conformist money-making” ? Don’t we have as much right to assign to at least one of these lovers an ability to pursue humanities (“humanistic education”)? And if we go further with this logic (the basis for which is our own imagination), won’t the lover–or lovers– with a humanistic education still have to “work (in the public realm) to provide for their private relations”? The only way for them not to have to work would be to live off someone’s generosity–either that of the state (public welfare) or that of their parents (private welfare). The only way (I’m using your categorical way of structuring my sentences) –or perhaps one of the many ways (now I’m using a more “pluralistic” structure)– to have “the understanding of how to make personal relationships more developed, successful, sublimated” is to be responsible in personal relationships, i.e. to take on an adult’s responsibility for one’s love and its consequences (children, etc.), to provide for them, since by not providing one creates dependence on public or private welfare–“an exploitative position” par excellence.

Now we have a vision of these lovers in the far-off future, when they supposedly pull away from each other’s lips, and looking around them, batting their youthful eyelashes, suddenly come to a realization of the need to support their “private relations” by going to work “in the public sphere”, as you put it. But then something strange happens in your text: there’s an imaginative leap from their potential future with its imperative of earning a living to their “conservative posture vis-à-vis political reality”. First, if we do imagine a future for these lovers temporarily lost in their kiss, why do we have to predict and limit their line of work–why state that they will look for employment in the technical or financial sector? Why not imagine another scenario, in which their liberal arts and or/ scientific education give them an impetus to work for an NGO fighting poverty or to search for a green job such as a conservation biologist or to become a teacher working with underprivileged kids in so called “dangerous” inner city neighborhoods? Since your claim of their future as (political) “conservatives” is in the realm of imagination, there’s nothing stopping us to imagine anything about this couple, whether or not it is implicit in Brancusi’s work.

Brancusi’s art helps you think about “private” vs. “public”, but I think the sculptures are only about the dyad itself.

These scultures are beautiful because they embody the utter enrapture of two persons, the drive to become/engulf the other. Simple, visceral, love-lust. Victor, you are trying too hard to make something larger out of this.

I enjoyed both readings this morning and was so surprised to discover this “Blog” by clicking on Google’s picturesque design.
My wife and I discussed the same subject matter that Victor puts as
“cataclysmic politico-economic system” before logging on the internet.
Interesting subject, interesting coincidences and by all means beautiful sculpture.
Thanks !!!

What Victor’s narrative reminds me of is the tendency to imagine extremes. Elements of Orwell’s 1984 are here, but the overall scheme has not come about: Societies are full of people who naturally go in many different directions. In the realm of ideas, there is no brake on the imagination, no softening of polarities, unless the thinker is already balanced by their own experience in the real world. Surely another tendency is to feel irresistably drawn to express our experience and to interject that into our relationships and into what we artistically or otherwise fashion.

Thinking is a great form of entertainment! I enjoy it when it enriches, and try to throw it out the window when it does not.

Having read both the interesting interpretation along with the series of photos and the comment by Nina, it seems to me the purpose of art is to generate individual perspectives and considerations of those offered by others. Thank you for this.

Wow. I totally loved this post! I was just searching for Brancusi’s work and found this blog! 🙂 I agree. Many lovers just feel l kidnapped from real world and forget about the whole reality around them. It happened to me.

I believe that Brancusi’s The Kiss spoke volumes to Victor, when it spoke not at all to me. I prefer Rodin’s The Kiss. In any event I am blind to the overall social message that is being depicted by this series of sculpture, and I tend to agree with Nina more so than Victor.

In defense of love, I would like to provide a quote from an interview with Chris Hedges on PBS. Hedges was a war correspondent for about two decades. By his own admission, he became addicted to war, going from one conflict to another. Hedges has seen the worst of mankind’s behavior and yet he believes in love:

Q: When you were covering war, you found that the effects on you were such that you sought out the company of people who were in love. Would you talk about that a little bit?

A: We used to call it the “Linda Blair effect” in Bosnia. You think you’ve suddenly found the one, normal person that you can have a rational conversation with, and then after 15 minutes their head starts to spin around. It’s just amazing how almost everyone becomes infected with the rhetoric of wartime, and they just parrot back the cliches they’re handed. Whatever disquiet they feel, it’s as if they can’t express it. They’re robbed of language.

In every conflict I’ve been in, the only antidote is people who find their fulfillment, their sense of being, in love. In the Balkans, these were often couples who had mixed marriages and, therefore, they were immune from the rhetoric; to paint all Serbs as evil, or all Muslims as evil, or all Croats as evil was to denigrate the spouse, to dehumanize the spouse — which they couldn’t do. These [relationships] are always sanctuaries — sanctuaries that I went to in the war in Salvador. And this is something that I’ve thought about years later.

It doesn’t mean that they didn’t become victims. It doesn’t mean that they weren’t eventually wiped out. But it provided a small circle of sanity in the midst of the insanity, where all of that rhetoric, all of that drive for the ruthless annihilation of the other was held at bay, always by couples, which is why, usually, when you look at people who intervene in a town or a village to help a minority under threat, it’s usually couples — one of whom has that kind of moral quality and knows they have to take a moral stance, and the other who has that kind of compassion and caring that the daily maintenance of taking care of another requires.

I love Brancusi’s The Kiss. I found your blog and the entry very interesting, however, there is an aspect that is to me just as important as the lovers kiss itself. It speaks as a sculpture. This was a rock in which Brancusi saw something else, and to me that is wonderful. He saw a pair of lovers locked in an embrace in a simple piece of nature, in things we see everyday. Some people say they prefer Rodin’s Kiss, but I think they’re forgetting this aspect of submission to nature in Brancusi’s sculpture. That is what I love about it. Be well.